2002 Sci/Tech Web Awards: COMPUTER SCIENCE

Growing at a rate of about 10 terabytes a month, the Internet Archive is an ambitious endeavor that has succeeded over the past six years in assembling a 100-terabyte (more than 10 billion pages) digital library of the World Wide Web. A favorite stop is the Wayback Machine, which lets you view select pages of many different Web sites as they appeared in past years.

Established in 1996, the Computer History Museum houses one of the largest collections of computing artifacts in the world, including more than 3,000 artifacts, 2,000 films and videotapes, 5,000 photographs, 2,000 linear feet of catalogued documentation and gigabytes of software. If you can't go see it in person in Mountain View, Calif., you can view much of the collection at this site. A searchable timeline covers significant innovations in hardware and software technology, milestones in commercial applications and artificial intelligence, and biographical sketches of pioneers from 1945 to 1990.

We've come to rely on it for so many things, but how does the Internet work? How was it invented? The Living Internet tells you all that, plus it explains advanced programming techniques for the Internet, troubleshooting methods and related information. And talk about authoritative: this collaborative Web book gets its descriptions from many of the people who developed the Internet itself.

"I always say, People don't go into computer science because they want to work with the public." We'll admit, A.L.I.C.E. can sometimes sound cryptic and profound at the same time. But e-conversing with this "chatbot" can be highly diverting, and sometimes you have the eerie feeling that there's a person back there. Want more? You can download several files written in Artificial Intelligence Markup Language to design your own chatbot; several links will also take you to the talkative handiwork of others.

The Internet Public Library is the place to find useful and fascinating reference guides on, well, pretty much everything. In addition to the reference works are collections of newspapers, magazines and other online texts. And you don't even have to whisper when you visit.